1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is broadly concerned with improved synthetic resin fluorescent tube supports adapted to be used in the packaging and shipping of elongated fluorescent tubes in order to prevent breakage thereof. More particularly, it is concerned with a tube support of the general type described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,705,170, which has been improved by specific structural features enabling the support to be fabricated using significantly less synthetic resin material, while at the same time giving equivalent or even enhanced tube protection.
2. Description of the Prior Art
U.S. Pat. No. 4,705,170 and 4,792,045 describe fluorescent tube dunnage supports formed of integral, synthetic resin sheet material which are designed to be used in lieu of traditional supports manufactured from pulp or the like. A prime advantage of the supports described in the mentioned patents stem from the fact that they are machine dispensable, i.e. they overcome the problems heretofore associated with attempts at machine dispensing pulp tube supports, and thereby lower manufacturing costs.
The tube supports described in these patents represent a substantial breakthrough in the art, and are commerically successful. However, increases in the cost of preferred synthetic resin materials (e.g. polyvinylchloride) have led to attempts to fabricate the supports using smaller quantities of synthetic resin. The straightforward approach of simply shortening the fore and aft length thereof has proved unsuccessful, inasmuch as modified supports simply do not provide the degree of breakage protection demanded by fluorescent tube manufacturers.
One response to the aforementioned problem is described in pending application per U.S. letters patent Ser. No. 07/396,562 filed Aug. 21, 1989. This application describes fluorescent tube supports specifically designed with sawtooth-like top walls between adjacent tube-receiving concavitie, along with specifially configured, upwardly and downwardly diverging, alternating wall sections along the length of the concavities thereof. These structural changes permit fabrication of a significantly shorter dunnage support without sacrifice of the necessary tube-protective functions thereof.